Pure Bollocks

Pure Bollocks was an Atari diskmag which was published between January and September 1993. Only three issues were published, although articles were written for an uncompleted fourth issue. The magazine was self-styled "underground" in style, and took forthright stances on various issues including the Atari scene, piracy, hacking, the internet, and even political issues. It was also known for it's irreverent approach to virtually all aspects of diskmag conventions

Editorial Team

• EGB's Smelly Sox - Editor, writer, intros, code, putting together
• Genie (Also of Network Trash) - Co-editor, Writer, GUI engineer
• Flowerman - Intros, writer
• Gigantic Left Teste aka GLT - Intros, writer
• Dwarf (Also of The Enforcers) - Writer, code

Occasional contributors

• Agrajag
• Assassin of the Enforcers
• BAT
• Bip of Hopeless Lamers
• The Coke fiend
• ESP
• Matrix
• Mr Orb
• MUG UK
• Potsan of Lemmings
• Rich Tea
• Robo
• Rolf Rolphnic
• Wheee the Fibble
• Wintermute

History

The initial issue of Pure Bollocks resulted from the remains of two stalled projects. One was a planned sequel for the Perpetual Dawn Demo by it's co-creator EGB's Smelly Sox; the other the Network Trash Megademo by Network Trash, an online crew. A major feature of this demo was that it would feature articles and discussions by the group in text format on it's own custom document displayer. The coder of this display, and chief coder of the megademo, was Genie, also a friend of EGB's Smelly Sox.

When the Network Trash Megademo fell through, Genie joined with EGB's Smelly Sox to make a one-off diskmag in around mid October 1992. Initially intended to showcase the Network Trash articles and general online issues such as phreaking and the Internet, the scope of the magazine rapidly expanded to include elements of the Scottish scene. An influence on the house style was Amazine issue 1, which was starting to spread around the UK scene. Also, as the magazine was intended to be a one-off, many of the conventions of Atari diskmags were treated in an irreverent manner. This is most apparent in the naming of the magazine as Pure Bollocks, and the decision to number the issue as 21, a random number. (Which also happened to be larger than any Atari diskmag published at the time.) As the magazine neared completion during the Christmas period, there was major downturn in Atari scene activity amid criticism of Atari's handling of the rollout of it's Falcon computer in competition to Commodore's already released Amiga A1200. Much of the criticism filtered through to the diskmag, particularly in an editorial excoriating Atari's behaviour, but also in a general irreverence to areas of the "offical" ST Scene such as magazines and public domain libraries.

PB #21 was released on 16th January 1993. In the endpiece article, written just before release, EGB's Smelly Sox admits that the magazine was intended to be a one-off, but was considering continuing depending on the reaction. In fact, the reaction was strong enough to lead to a 2 disk issue, numbered #22, on 27 March 1993. A further 2 disk issue, #23, appeared on the 18th of September of the same year.

However, due to the various members workload in other areas, momentum stalled on a fourth issue. Initially planned for release on January 1994, PB #34 (Based on a numbering system of (year+1).issue_no ) did not appear. Two attempts to resurrect the process, one in 1995 and another 1997, failed to generate enough momentum. A number of articles intended for the issue briefly surfaced on PB fan site. One of which, A Day in the life of a Console Freak was awarded Cruel Site of the Day.

Links

• Pure Bollocks issues on pouet.net [1]